I am excited to announce that, with the support of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, I am hiring a one-year postdoctoral fellow working on issues around AI, art, and aesthetics. Please see the full call for applications here, and spread the word to anyone who might be interested!
This year I am excited to have taken on a couple of new roles at Stanford, and I wanted shout about them briefly to express my gratitude and hope.
First, I am honored to have received a courtesy appointment in German Studies from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. While my primary appointment remains in the Department of Art & Art History, I will now be able to teach and advise graduate students in German as well, and I am excited to collaborate more closely with my colleagues there.
Second, I have joined the Committee in Charge in Modern Thought & Literature, Stanford’s premier interdisciplinary humanities program. I have been working closely and learning from students in the program over the past couple of years, including serving on several dissertation committees, and I have discovered so many affinities with students and faculty alike, so officially joining the program feels in many ways like coming home.
Finally, for the duration of the 2020-2021 academic year, I am honored to have been awarded a Faculty Research Fellowship at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, where I am learning from an amazing interdisciplinary cohort of peers while developing a new project around seriality and serialization. Taking up Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “serialities” as anonymous, alienated collectives, as well as Iris Marion Young’s re-working of the concept with respect to gender and specifically feminist purposes, the project relates these socio-political conceptions of seriality to the serialization of experience and identity in contemporary digital media.
In all, I am feeling very grateful for these new and strengthened interdisciplinary networks, which give me hope for the future of the humanities at Stanford.
My department, the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford, is one of four (along with East Asian Languages & Cultures, English, and Theater & Performance Studies) looking to host a recent PhD as a 2-year Mellon Fellow. The position offers ample time to research, a generous stipend ($83,000), full benefits, a research fund, and an opportunity to work with some amazing people in the humanities at Stanford.
Full details, eligibility, requirements, and application process are outlined on the website of the Stanford Humanities Center.
Please spread the word if you know someone who would benefit from this opportunity!
Excerpted from the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Another excerpt:
For more info, consider following my colleague David Palumbo-Liu on Twitter @palumboliu.
Introducing the inaugural Stanford – Leuphana Summer Academy:
Stanford–Leuphana Summer Academy 2019
»Against presentism. Historicizing mediality«
Thinking about technological changes or revolutions is often marked by a presentist, ahistorical mode of thinking and debate. Consider the contemporary discussion about »digital culture« and its technologies. The tropes mobilized are usually technicist and innovation- or even disruption-oriented, in both their affirmative and critical guises. Little attention is given to historical precursors of technologically driven social change. Even less attention is given to concepts and theories from other historical periods that might help investigate and understand our current predicament.
The Stanford-Leuphana Summer Academy seeks to change perspectives by focusing on concepts and theories that break with the myopia of presentism. In seeking to formulate a new research area in terms of other periods (e.g. premodern or early modern) and fields (e.g. anthropology, religious studies, art history, etc.), this 5-day seminar seeks to historicize mediality in productive and innovative ways. If »digital cultures« are not only modernity’s final product, but also brought an end to modernity, then it might be inspiring to think about digital cultures beyond or apart from modern concepts. What terms are historically specific for an age or culture, and what concepts apply broadly to various phenomena from the premodern to the present age? In what ways do preliterate, oral, or ritualistic cultures intersect with digital modes of information? How can these other perspectives change our thinking about the present?
Key terms:»ritual«, »authorship«, »sovereignty«, »arcane«, »orality«, »participation«, »public sphere«, »social construction of time«, »art«, »literature«, »history«, »philosophy«, »history of science«, »historiography«
Date: June 24 – 28, 2019
Location: Stanford Berlin, »Haus Cramer«, Pacelliallee 18, 14195 Berlin
Faculty
- Timon Beyes (Sociology of Organisation and Culture, Leuphana)
- Shane Denson (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
- Elena Esposito (Sociology, Modena/Reggio Emilia)
- Marisa Galvez (French, Italian, and German Studies, Stanford)
- Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht (Comparative Literature and German Studies, Stanford)
- Thomas Macho (Cultural History, IFK Vienna)
- Karla Oeler (Film and Media Studies, Stanford)
- Claus Pias (History and Epistemology of Media, Leuphana)
- Fred Turner (Communication, Stanford)
- Sigrid Weigel (Literature and Cultural Science, Berlin)
Application
All applications must be submitted electronically in PDF format. Please submit your CV (1-2 pages) along with a 500-word abstract of your topic, and a short letter of intent explaining why you would like to attend this Summer Academy.
Please use the following naming convention for your application files:Lastname_CV.pdf, Lastname_Abstract.pdf, Lastname_Letter_of_Intent.pdf.
Please email your applications to Nelly Y. Pinkrah (nelly.pinkrah@leuphana.de).
This summer school is designed for graduate students. The deadline for applications for the summer school is December 15, 2018. All applicants will be informed about the selection of participants by end of January 2019. The working language of the Summer Academy will be English.
The organizers will cover travel (economy) and accommodation costs for the time of the summer school. No additional fees will be charged.
Contact
Claus Pias (pias@leuphana.de)
Please spread the word to graduate students who might benefit from an interdisciplinary effort to rethink mediality and its relation to history.
Above, some of the featured undergraduate courses in Stanford’s Film & Media Studies lineup for 2018-2019. A full listing of course offerings can be found here.
Syllabus for my grad seminar on Seriality (spring 2017).
Syllabus for “Frankenstein and Film” (Spring 2017).
Happy to be on the steering committee for Frankenstein@200 — a year-long series of events taking place at Stanford in 2018. I’ll be participating in a number of ways, including talks and several courses related to Frankenstein, among other things. I’ll post details here in due time. Also be sure to check out the project website, which is still under construction, but which is already chock full of announcements and constantly being updated.
The year 2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publishing of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. The novel is eerily relevant today as we face ethical dilemmas around appropriate use of stem cells, questions about organ donation and organ harvesting, as well as animal to human transplants. Additionally, the rise of artificial intelligence portends an uncertain future of the boundaries between machines and humans. Frankenstein@200, will be a year-long series of academic courses and programs including a film festival, a play, a lecture series and an international Health Humanities Conference that will examine the numerous moral, scientific, sociological, ethical and spiritual dimensions of the work, and why Dr. Frankenstein and his monster still capture the moral imagination today. This project will be sponsored by the Stanford Medicine & the Muse Program in partnership with the Stanford Humanities Center, the Stanford Arts Institute, the Office of Religious Life, the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Stanford Continuing Studies, the Cantor Arts Center, the Department of Art & Art History, and the Center for Biomedical Ethics.
Syllabus for the next iteration of my seminar “Post-Cinema” (senior capstone / graduate seminar), Department of Art & Art History, Winter 2017.